One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.

We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?

Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?

I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.

If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it.

Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.

I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.

The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.

New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.

It won't be long before we'll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.

I'm completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.

The truth between two people always cuts two ways.

There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.

Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words

Everyone finds my work super sad. I never do. I always find it uplifting in a weird way.

When we are truly passionate about something we are contagious.

We have come dangerously close to accepting the homeless situation as a problem that we just can't solve.

In matters of government, justice means force as well as virtue.

If you are really Master of your Fate, it shouldn't make any difference to you whether Cleopatra or the Bearded Lady is your mate.

Failure is but the longer road to triumph.

If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, arbiter of your destiny, against which you are powerless.